


Burn

by Amodelofefficiency



Category: The Doctor Blake Mysteries
Genre: F/M
Language: English
Status: In-Progress
Published: 2017-11-18
Updated: 2017-11-29
Packaged: 2019-02-03 22:16:09
Rating: Not Rated
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 2
Words: 5,847
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/12757233
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/Amodelofefficiency/pseuds/Amodelofefficiency
Summary: It's been almost twenty years since a man made her question herself, had made her wonder if her life was destined for more than the coif and the sounds of voices raised in benediction. But then she had met the Lucien Blake. [A Call the Midwife AU]





	1. Burn

****She’s draining potatoes for the evening's meal when Sister Agatha pushes through the door of the convent’s kitchen, heaving a crate of vegetables onto the table with a thud that startles her from her daydream. Her grip on the pot slips as she turns to scold Agatha for surprising her, and before either woman can react the full bowl of boiling water has tipped to the side, soft potatoes falling to splatter in the basin and water sloshing down her front. **  
**

Sister Agatha is upon her at once, apologising and pulling at the sleeve of her tunic before she has time to notice that it’s drenched in boiling water, seeping through the layers of fabric to scald her normally covered skin. The pain blossoms immediately and Agatha bustles around her with nervous energy – turning the faucet to ice cold and plucking the soggy potatoes from the sink.

She tries to assure the older woman that she’s fine, that it’s just a small burn. “Nothing more than running your finger through a flame, the way the altar boys do after Mass.”

But Agatha takes her elbow and steers her towards the stream of cold water, easing her arm under with a tut and holding her steady as she jerks away. “Gentle, dear. It’s a shock, I know.”

The burn is bright red on alabaster, the skin of her forearm so rarely exposed to light now blooming with heat and a sharp pain she hasn’t felt in years. She’s normally so  _careful_. But her mind has been elsewhere, lost in dangerous thoughts that have distracted her from work all week.

She shivers as the cold water pours over her skin and tries to focus on steadying her breathing.

_Our father who art in heaven, hallowed be thy name. Thy kingdom come, thy will be done –_

“I’ll call Doctor Blake,” says Sister Agatha.

_Thy will be. Thy will – you’re being ridiculous, Jean-girl._

She grips Agatha’s arm with her good hand. “We shouldn’t worry him.”

“Nonsense, Sister Brigid. Best to be safe. I’ll call him immediately.”

She watches Agatha leave the kitchen and wonders when her life began to unravel.

 

* * *

 

She’s not supposed to think about men the way she thinks about Lucien Blake.

She took a vow when she was 20-years-old, a solemn and sacred promise, and it was supposed to stop the thoughts and the glances, the way her teenage heart would flutter when young Christopher Beazley brushed his hand against her own at the milk bar, or Matthew Lawson blushed as he carried her books home from school.

The decision had not been her own, but it had been so many years now that she could hardly remember; her life now felt as if it had always been this way. God’s plan, as Sister Agatha would say. And life in the convent was far from torturous. There was good food and good conversation, the chance to make a difference in the community, and a quiet that allowed her to remove herself from the world and surrender to God.

Her only true condition when her father presented her with her life plan was that she be allowed the chance to study – to equip herself with some skill that would make her useful, more than her ability to bake a good sponge and grow a successful begonia. Nursing perhaps, or midwifery. She wanted her hands to do God’s work, but she wanted that work to be practical.

She had chosen Brigid, patron saint of Ireland and midwives, for her maternal grandmother. “And the patron saint of dairy farmers,” she had told her father, brushing down the coarse hair of their cow.

And so Jean Randall had become Sister Brigid, and the spark that once followed the curly-haired girl made way for a servant of God with wise eyes and a knowing smile; gentle hands that helped bring life into the world and a strength that made her a favourite among the nursing laity.

Quick witted but kind, and with a voice that Father Morton believed could only be a gift from the Father, she ran the children’s Christmas service yearly, persuading the young ones into their shepherd’s beards and angel’s wings before sending them on their way at the end of the night with the promise of blessings and Saint Nick in the morning.

It had been almost twenty years since a man had made her question herself, had made her wonder if her life was destined for more than the coif and the sounds of voices raised in benediction.

But then she had met Lucien Blake.

She’d nursed Thomas Blake through the worst of his days, reading cricket scores and medical journals aloud by his bedside, turning down sheets and blankets, sponging warm skin, and cooking chicken soup and shepherd's pie to feed to him in small bites. She’d found the old man charming but lonely, prone to fits of melancholy and quick to turn at the thought of his past; his long-buried wife and wayward son.

 _Lucien._ Thomas had spoken enough of the man for her to know that he shared his father’s brilliance. He was a doctor, and there was a sense of tragedy in his nature; a broken childhood, restless years in Edinburgh and London. And then the war.

“A good man,” Thomas had told her often, gripping her hands as if her belief lay in her palms. “My boy is a good man.”

She’d seen the box of returned letters by Thomas’s bedside, and in the last few months of his life had been his scribe.  _All I've ever hoped for is that you would do your best, and that you would find someone to love you regardless of what happened next._

Her own father had said something similar, kissing her cheek as she left the family home for the final time. “All you have to do is be your best, Jean-girl. God will guide you through the rest.”

But there was no God in the man who fell at their doorstep days before Thomas’s passing, eyes sunken with grief and whiskey on his breath as he watched his father wither away.

She was used to mothers and fathers at the start of their journey, children in their infancy, babes in arms. The pondering over names, the readying of nurseries. And even in darker times – when there were already seven mouths to feed and the mothers begged her for relief, there was a sense of something miraculous. A new life with new purpose under heaven.

But death was something different; the grief of the son clawing at her insides until she could hardly look Lucien in the eye. And he hadn’t wanted a nun on his doorstep, sidestepping around her with the awkward but volatile air of man who felt betrayed by the church.

She knew enough of his past to understand his reasoning, even if her faith taught her that he would find respite in God. But she couldn’t help the niggling doubt in the pit of her stomach – where was God’s plan in Lucien Blake? Where was His justice? Where was His mercy?

She prayed for him at night, locked in the solitude of her bedroom. Not for God to find him, but for Lucien to find peace within himself. Perhaps that was when life first started to unravel, when she put her faith in a human over the Father. Or perhaps it was the following morning at confession, when she decided not to speak, choosing Lucien over God instead.

 

* * *

 

Now she sees him in fits and starts – sometimes there are weeks where all she hears is his name in passing, a case solved at the last second due to his brilliance, or a drunken tirade at the Colonist’s Club. Her heart aches for the pain he endures. She remembers her father in the years following the Great War, the vacant look in his eyes and the shake in his hands on Bonfire Night. She _knows_ war, has seen it twist the best men of their generation into shadows of their former selves. And she asks God for reasoning – why allow millions to die? Why shatter those remaining?

Perhaps life started to unravel when she received no answer.

Perhaps she’s not meant to know.

And then there are days when Lucien is everywhere. The lyrical voice on the ward as she visits parishioners; the quiet and dignified end to long evenings when she accompanies Father Morton as he provides Last Rites.

Sister Bernadette breaks her arm and Lucien joins them that evening for supper, a strange, sick feeling burning low in her stomach that Bernadette had been able to convince him to sit with them when only months ago he had turned her and the church away in shame.

Another moment of unraveling; the cruel twist of jealousy.

For Lucien is at once nothing and everything that she remembers from her childhood fantasies – taciturn and challenging, but kind and loyal. Charming and witty and passionate and strong. And late at night, when she closes her eyes and lets herself return to the girl of fifteen who was in love with the chiselled farmhand who had worked alongside her father, she lets herself think about the cut of Lucien’s jaw, the broad set of his shoulders, and the sparkle in his eye when he smiles.

She’s only caused that smile a handful of times, and the memories burn bright within her.

She’s caught him looking at her, his soft gaze at her back as they work alongside each other, administering vaccines to school children and the elderly at Town Hall. Their hands brush and she snatches her fingers away from his, feels something coil in her stomach as he mutters an apology, “Sorry, Sister Brigid,” and her moniker has never felt such a regret as it does on his lips.

She doesn’t understand why he dominates the parts of her heart and soul that have always belonged to an omnipresence far beyond the reach of this existence. She’s always been prone to fits of daydreaming, but her faith is strong, and she doesn’t know how much longer she can continue feeling torn by a man she hardly knows.

But she does know him. She knows the parts of him that ache and yearn. The parts that draw him up and out of bed in the morning. Through Thomas she learnt his history, but in those brief days of grief when Thomas’s soul left them for the Father she had seen Lucien’s soul. Broken and drowning in whiskey though it may have been, there had been something within him that burned bright enough to catch within her.

Maybe a part of her has belonged to him ever since.

 

* * *

 

Lucien arrives quickly, as if the thought of her injury compels him across town quicker than she imagines is possible. One moment she’s cradling her arm with a cold compress on the kitchen table and the next she hears his voice at the convent door.

The thought of being so near him is intoxicating but impossible – her greatest desire and expressly forbidden. Perhaps this is a test placed upon her by God, like Abraham with Isaac; perhaps God intends to push her to see how far she’ll burn.

Lucien rounds the corner to the kitchen and drops to the chair beside her. Sister Agatha hovers in the doorway and she tries to pin her attention on the older woman’s face, the lines on her forehead and the slight slip of hair peeking out from her coif. She’d be mortified to know it was visible in the presence of a lay man.

“Sister Brigid,” Lucien greets her, and his voice is warm and familiar; intimate, she thinks briefly. He picks up her arm to inspect her wound and she tries not to think about the care with which he treats her – soft as if she is something precious, gentle as if he’s trying to atone for a past sin.

She thinks she’s imagining it at first. Perhaps the pain has made her woozy. It’s been so long since she sat with someone else taking care of her – hands wrapped around her wrist and the edge of his knee touching her own beneath the table.

They’d left things so torn the last time she’d talked to him, bitter words of accusation thrown at her faith and cruel words thrown at his nature.  _Drunkard. Charlatan. Weak. Fool._

She can’t remember the last time she fought with anyone, her position in society instilling a sense of formal peace in all that surrounded her. But with Lucien she had felt free to speak her mind, even if it had hurt them both.

It’s played on her mind for weeks, the ease at which they’d cut through each other’s masquerades and frailties to attack something pure, the way they saw into the soul within. But now he’s sat before her with a tired smile, an acquiesce to a cup of tea from Sister Agatha, and the simple task of bandaging her arm from wrist to elbow.

He’s gentle in his care, rubbing his thumb against the underside of her wrist where the skin remains sensitive but undamaged, and she’s acutely aware that Sister Agatha has left them alone.

“It was silly,” she tells him, desperate to break the silence. He doesn't glance up from his work, but hums to prompt her to continue.

“I was draining potatoes at the sink, and then Sister Agatha startled me. So I looked up, and before I knew it….well, it serves me right for not watching what I was doing.”

She doesn’t tell him that she’d been thinking about their argument, that she’d seen him that afternoon across the hall in the hospital, talking to Doctor Harvey, and that for a moment when young Timmy Martin had bumped into his legs as he ran down the hall to see his ailing mother, and Lucien had stopped to smile and pick up the youngster for a spin, that something inside her had unfolded, blossoming out from her heart and drowning her thoughts ever since.

“I’m so sorry,” he murmurs.

He tucks the edge of the bandage and secures it firmly, but continues to hold her hand. He lifts her hand slowly, turning it over until her palm is exposed, and it takes her a moment to realise what is happening, even as he pulls her hand up and presses cool lips to the curve of her skin.

She knows then, as his lips burn brighter than scalding water, that whatever this is between them is mutual, and she jerks her hand away startled, terrified by the implication. This was so much easier to control when it was a fantasy that existed in her head.

“I’m sorry, that was unforgivable,” Lucien stutters, and she closes her eyes, unable to turn to look at him.

It  _was_ unforgivable. But god, she would move heaven and earth herself just to live through that moment again.

“Who is it that gets to decide what is unforgivable?” she asks, thinking of her father’s night terrors, the young men who never returned from war, mothers sobbing in her arms because they can’t bear the thought of another mouth to feed; a broken, beautiful man torn from his wife and daughter.

“I think you know,” Lucien says.

“All I know is that I’m not turning my back because of you, but because of Him.”

Tomorrow when she sits before Father Morton and is forced to consider her weaknesses and transgressions, and asks for God’s forgiveness and His grace and penitence, she’ll think of the way Lucien’s breath comes now in short, sharp bursts. The way his lips had felt more alive than anything she’s experienced in decades. How sometimes she wakes from dreams where their bodies fit together in perfect tandem, sweat-slicked and burning with desire and love, and the sob that rises in her chest in those moments. She’ll think of Thomas’s pleas, that Lucien find someone to love him, and the whisper that she could be that woman, like an apple dangled before Eve.

She’ll kneel before God and whisper the Lord’s Prayer a hundred times and thumb rosary beads between her fingers, asking the Holy Mother for guidance, for a sign that she’s wrong.

But in this moment she lets herself feel the pain in her forearm, the still burning skin and her aching heart. The brush of fingertips, the blush of first time curiosity and love.

 _If this isn’t my path_ , she prays,  _please send me a sign._

Lucien rises from his chair.

“Sister Brigid,” he says in farewell, and she can hear the anguish in his voice.

His footsteps retreat and the front door slams.

It’s her final unravelling.


	2. Fall

Lucien watches the gold flakes shimmer on the ceiling, tiny specks of light that dance before his tired eyes and blur as the whiskey settles in his stomach. In the quiet of the study his thoughts feel all the more loud, pressing in around him as the fire pops and hisses. 

He tries not to think on the day’s events, sick with anger and guilt. The last few months there’s been a feeling he’s being steered down a dark path  – a brush with his own mortality and the lose of his mother, the death of a priest by the hands of a doctor. He’s left with questions he fears will never be answered. And now a terrible whisper over his shoulder  – what does it mean if all he can focus on during those times is her?  

_ The housekeeper committed theft, stole a porcelain doll. The nun questions her beliefs, falls prey to desires  _ –

Desires and what? He hadn’t been able to read more, Father Morton’s scribbled notes illegible as they reached the edge of the page. 

But it’s foolish to think it’s in reference to her. Between the convent and the orphanage there are any number of nuns with whom Father Morton crossed paths, hearing their confessions and judging their sins. And even if it was her, it feels unforgivable to assume her desire is anything more than innocent. One could desire material things. Clothing, food, and money, he reasons.

He’s the one who wakes late at night with phantom hands and lips on his body and an unfulfilled ache in his chest, unable to picture her but feeling her all the same. She’s unknown to him, entirely forbidden.  _ God, _ he laughs, disgusted with himself,  _ you don’t even know her name. _

But he knows love  – its euphoria and desperation, its triumph and its fall  – and worse yet he knows those lingering moments before love, the way life seems to sharpen around a person, narrowing his thoughts until he’s consumed. He doesn’t love her yet, no. But she consumes all of his moments. 

And now someone else he loves is paying the price. 

He closes his eyes and leans his head back against the lounge; all he can see is Matthew’s forced smile and the shake in his hands as he’d gathered his belongings to leave the station.

“Exceptional work, Lucien,” Matthew had told him. 

The words ring in Lucien’s ears.  _ Exceptional.  _ It was laughable. How wrong Matthew had been.

There’s nothing exceptional about Lucien Blake.

Two people  –  one he’s known his entire life and the other only a few months  – and he’s destroying them both. 

“Selfish fool,” he murmurs. The whiskey burns down the back of his throat. 

How had he missed what was happening? Hadn’t Matthew warned him, tried to stand in his way to stop the fall only to end up taking it himself? And all because Lucien was blind to his own fallibility.

On the mantel above the fireplace is a portrait of Lucien as a young boy, Genevieve capturing his blond hair and serious smile. He tries to remember back to that time  – his mother’s perfume, Chopin played on the piano; sharp murmurs in french and broken glass. Was that before or after he first met Matthew? 

At some point the memories started to become pantomimes  – closer to expectation than reality.

But he remembers the classroom with maps of the empire and a portrait of the King on the wall, how Matthew had sat a few rows behind him and struggled with his sums the first four months of school. Had their friendship started then, he wonders, Lucien whispering answers to Matthew at lunch until he’d mastered subtraction? Or was it later, when Matthew had sat by his side an entire afternoon and watched him follow ants around the playground, shouting at the older boys who called him Lucy and kicked footballs at their heads?

From that time on it was Matthew who joined him on make-believe safaris and pirate ships, taught him how to hold a cricket bat and shoot bottle tops off garden walls with a slingshot. Matthew, with his close-lipped smile and quiet laugh, who was endlessly patient with Lucien’s many whims and fancies, following him down to the river to search for bunyips and digging up the garden to discover dinosaur bones.

In those golden days of childhood when friendship was without question, the two boys had been inseparable, and even as they grew older and Matthew became quieter, and Lucien sometimes lost track of his friend among science experiments and orders to be home by four; even when Lucien was sent to Melbourne and they were forced to send each other packages  – quick notes with updates on cricket scores, jokes and anecdotes, and perfect cicada shells wrapped in handkerchiefs  – there was still a sense of permanence. Because Matthew meant Ballarat. And Ballarat meant home. 

But now Matthew was leaving. 

“Exceptional,” Lucien laughs. “Exceptionally wrong, old friend. Everything I touch lately burns. You’re better off without me.”

She was better off without him too.

Not that he'd been hers in the first place. He clearly remembers their first meeting, the steel in her eyes as she’d opened the door. The memory is startling in its clarity. 

“Doctor,” she’d greeted, and he’d stood watching her a long moment, trying to piece together a series of events that led to a nun at his childhood door. 

Her hair was hidden by her coif, her figure hidden beneath the layers of her tunic. So much of her image was made of cloth, but when Lucien pictures her all he sees are her eyes, brilliant in their strength and furious in their appraisal. 

How was it that someone dedicated to God had crawled into the broken crevices inside him, challenging him without knowing to wake up in the morning, to seek justice for the fallen, to be a better version of himself? 

They’d argued once, Sister Brigid finding him drunk at the piano and slapping a hand to his knee to get his attention before helping him to bed. He remembers the night in vivid snatches of detail  – the strength in her arms as she’d led him down the hall, her soft breath on his cheek as she’d hovered over him a moment. 

“I don’t believe in your God,” he’d murmured, intent on turning her away. But her hand on his chest had been a warm, solid weight. 

“I know,” she told him. “You don’t have to.”

That had been the moment. Not the first time he saw her or the first time she smiled. Not over quiet cups of tea or shouted words. It had been the resolve in her voice that he alone was enough that stuck with him, catching in his chest until he’d been unable to shake her off. 

From that moment on he’d been in free fall. 

Mattie’s knock breaks his musings. The young woman stands in the doorway and watches him carefully. It’s not the first time she’s come across him after too many drinks, and though it shames him to admit there’s been a lot of them lately. 

“The phone?” he asks, voice soft to try and assure her.  _ I’m okay, _ he hopes she understands.  _ Please don’t worry for me. Look after yourself.  _

“It’s the convent,” she explains, and Lucien feels his breath catch. This is the last thing he needs.

“Not another one?” he jokes, standing from the lounge. Mattie smiles, shaking her head. Her hair falls in front of her eyes and for a moment Lucien sees his own daughter; half asleep and yawning, brushing the hair from her eyes before being carried to bed. 

He blinks, and Li is gone. 

“No, nothing like that,” Mattie answers. “Sister Agatha is worried some of the others might have trouble sleeping. She thought you might be able to prescribe something?”

He nods. “Of course. Poor things. Let me grab my bag.”

Mattie stops him as he passes through the door, her gentle hand on his arm.  _ He mustn't drown her too,  _ he thinks. _ She’s the last good thing left in this place now that Matthew is gone. _

“Are you okay, Lucien?” she presses. He meets her gaze, strangely comforted by her refusal to look away from him. 

He covers her hand on his arm and squeezes tight. “I’m fine, Mattie. Truly.”

Some lies, he reasons, are more worthwhile than others. 

 

* * *

 

His knock is sharp on the kitchen doorframe. She’s alone in the room and her back is to the door, drying the last of the dishes from supper while the others play gin rummy around the fire. Every now and then she hears the gentle teasing of Sister Claire and Sister Ambrose and can picture the two of them smiling behind their playing cards.

It brings her comfort to hear their voices thick with laughter, even if Sister Agatha would disapprove. The murder of Father Morton has shaken their small community and even though the killer has been found she still feels rattled by their vulnerability, acutely aware of how close they all came to death’s call.

“I’m sorry to interrupt,” Doctor Blake says, and she closes her eyes for a moment with her back to him. She finishes wiping the last of the soap from the cutlery and sets the plates and bowls by the sink. He sounds nervous, and she wonders if this is to be their new normal. Hushed voices and apologetic words. Equally startled and terrified by the other’s existence. 

She still feels the ache in her palm from his kiss. 

She turns to face him with a smile, “Not at all, Doctor. Please, come in. Can I make you some tea?”

He hesitates, but she knows he’ll follow her lead. “That would be lovely.”

He sits at the kitchen table and she tries to ignore the memory of what happened the last time they were here. It’s not the first time she’s seen him since then, but up until now she’s been in the company of others; Sister Bernadette or Matilda O’Brien in the hospital, Sister Agatha at the station, and Superintendent Lawson as they’d taken her statement. 

She’d been the last to see Father Morton for confession that night  – her final memory of him will always be the judgement in his eyes.

“How is your arm?” the doctor asks. She appreciates the attempt at small talk. 

“Oh, fine.” She pulls the tin of tea leaves from the cupboard and adds teaspoons to the pot before settling it over the stove. There are biscuits in the pantry somewhere  – Sister Agatha’s secret stash of scotch fingers. Her fingers grope around the top shelves before settling over the biscuit tin.  _ Bingo.  _

Readying a plate of biscuits will buy her an extra few minutes.  

She wonders how long can she keep her back to him before it becomes conspicuous, or if that matters anymore. He’d been unable to meet her eye as he sat at the kitchen table, and there’s no denying that the room feels thick with tension  – butter would cut cleaner, as her grandmother would have said. 

She turns to him, carrying the plate of biscuits and his mug of tea and setting them down on the table. He sends her a quick smile in thanks before busying himself breaking the biscuits down the centre. 

It’s not until she sits across from him that he finally speaks. 

“I spoke with Sister Agatha earlier, she said the shock was still quite fresh.”

“Yes. Not losing him. We knew his time would be soon. But the way in which it happened. Such brutality.” She feels numb whenever she thinks of Father Morton’s lifeless body, the fear he must have felt as he realised what was happening and that it was too late. 

Is this how Lucien lives every day, surrounded by the depravity of murder? Has he grown numb to it too? Or does it claw at him? She aches to understand, but the questions feel too personal, too intimate. Too close to a version of them that can’t exist. 

“Evelyn came by earlier,” she says instead. “I think it will be hardest on her.”

Lucien nods, swirling the end of his biscuit through his tea. 

“They were close, weren’t they?” he asks. She runs her finger along the handle of her mug and tries to figure out the meaning behind his words. Is he trying to set boundaries for how their own relationship might progress? As friends, or colleagues. Could they be friends, she wonders? 

Perhaps she’s been imagining the tension between them all along. It’s not as if she’s had much practice. Not since she was 19 years old and Christopher Beazley had wanted to marry her. Maybe that moment in the kitchen had been an aberration. A mistake. Maybe his inability to meet her eye was simply because he felt awkward that she misunderstood.

No. She may be out of practice but she isn’t stupid. Whether he regretted what happened or not, in that moment his intent had been clear. 

“Evelyn was telling me she and Father Morton didn't always get along, but it didn't stop them from being great friends.” She pauses, gathering her courage. “Are we friends, Doctor Blake?”

He glances at her quickly. Can he see through her, she wonders? Does he know she’s drawing a line in the sand? There are times when she gets so caught in his blue eyes that it feels as if he sees right to the centre of her.

“I’m not a good friend to have around, Sister.”

“Nonsense,” she speaks quickly, and feels as he stiffens. 

His voice is low and practiced, but she can hear the edge of desperation. “I hurt people, and I don’t realise it until the damage is done. I can’t protect them  – not even my own wife and daughter. Or people leave. They die or they’re sent away. Danny and Nell Clasby and  – ”

The name falls short on his lips.

She thinks back to Sister Agatha's whispered news this afternoon. Of course. 

“You’re worried about Matthew.” It’s a statement, not a question, and she longs to reach a hand across the table to cover his own. He drops his head in acquiescence.

“You can’t blame yourself for that. The politics of the police are almost as complex as those of the church.”

“But it is my fault. I’ve been so blind, so selfish. So bloody  _ distracted,”  _ he erupts, the last part clearly directed at her. She feels hot with shame, her cheeks burning as he cowers back, startled by his outburst. His voice had been acerbic, loud enough to reach the other rooms.

When he finally speaks again his voice is controlled, but his words are full of regret. “I should have seen what they were doing to him. I should have done something to stop this. Or stopped myself from being a liability. I was blind as a child to what was happening and couldn’t protect him then, and now I’ve done it all over again. I am a bloody useless friend,” he presses. He sounds exhausted. “You don’t want to be friends with me, Sister.”

No, she thinks. She doesn't. 

What she wants is so at odds with everything she has ever known that to voice it would be blasphemous. Father Morton had seen through her, guessing at the gaps in her story as she’d stumbled through confession. He hadn’t guessed the man, but he understood the desire.

And what had he told her? “Pray, Sister Brigid. The Lord may be testing you, but you must remain strong. Kneel in supplication and pray, and cast these doubts aside.”

He’d been murdered the following morning. Had he prayed the night before? 

“Do you ever wonder why the church tells us to pray?” she asks. Lucien glances at her sharply, surprised by her question. 

The quote spills from his lips,  _ “ _ May my prayer be set before you like incense; may the lifting up of my hands be like the evening sacrifice.”

How on earth had he known that? 

“Psalms,” he murmurs. “My mother’s favourite. Should you be asking questions like that, Sister? Isn’t the answer always God’s will?”

“I believe in God,” she tells him firmly, ignoring his disparaging tone. The truth feels good on her lips, her thoughts slotting into place. “I believe in prayer. I believe that God listens to those in need, those who require guidance. I believe there’s a path for all of us”

“But?” Lucien prompts. 

But at some point she’d begun to realise the God she believes in is separate to the church. 

That’s the simple answer. And the most complicated. 

“We’re taught to kneel before God and whisper prayers in our heads. To keep our voices low. To believe that this is the only way to speak to the Father. Is he really that unforgiving, that we must come to him in fear?”

“What are you saying?” Lucien asks. His voice is soft, like he knows she’s fearful.  He’s always there, inside her head. 

“I don’t know.” A pause. And then more truth, “I do know that you’re a good man. A good friend. I know that Father Morton didn’t deserve to die the way he did. I know that Matthew doesn’t blame you. That he chose his own path, alongside you. You can’t blame yourself for the choices of other people.”

She reaches out across the table and covers Lucien’s hand. 

His eyes are like fire; she desperately wants to give him more. 

“This week was the first time I’ve been back to that church since my father’s funeral. Before that it was twenty odd years. I can’t remember the last time I prayed,” he confesses.  

“You should go back there,” she tells him. He looks at her strangely, like there’s more hidden in her words.

“To the church? And what  – kneel before God and whisper my prayers?” 

It’s strange to have her own doubts thrown back at her. 

“Yes. Or you could talk to Him. Tell Him how you feel. Get angry. Shout.”

“That sounds dangerous, Sister Brigid,” he quips.

She smiles, and his face grows softer. Another thing slots into place. 

“I’m beginning to think most worthwhile things are, Doctor Blake.”

 

* * *

 

This is the moment, he realises suddenly. 

_ Love.  _


End file.
